Sense of community in a higher education television-based distance education program

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to measure sense of classroom community in a television-based higher education distance education course and in the same course taught by the same instructor in a traditional face-to-face learning environment, in order to determine if differences existed and if so to identify the nature of these differences. Participants for this study consisted of 120 adult learners who were enrolled in either of two sections of a semester-long undergraduate educational technology course offered by an urban state university. One section was taught tradiationally and the other section was taught to a small studio audience and at a distance to 24 remote classroom sites using synchronous one-way television and two-way audio technologies. Study results revealed a significantly lower sense of classroom community among learners in the distance education course, to include the studio audience.

Keywords

Distance Education Distance Learning Remote Site Traditional Group Classroom Community

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